Why AT&T is evil to have multiple data plans

Oyster card, you just tap in and tap out around the system, and it charges you whatever's cheapest. You only make one journey? You only get charged for one journey. The minute that your journeys in one day add up to more than the daily-pass rate, you get charged the daily-pass rate, and no more. Similarly for your journeys in one week, with the weekly pass. And so on. Really, there's only one plan, and there's no way to get inadvertently ripped off.

When AT&T decided to abolish unlimited data usage on its smartphones, that's the kind of of plan it should have implemented. Instead, it went the evil route, and it's forcing its current customers to make one of three different choices, based on limited information. Whatever they choose is quite likely to be the wrong choice, and AT&T will chortle as it collects all that extra money which its customers didn't need to pay.

On the London Underground, you don’t need to decide whether it makes more sense to buy an individual ticket or to buy a daily or a weekly or a monthly pass. With the Oyster card, you just tap in and tap out around the system, and it charges you whatever’s cheapest. You only make one journey? You only get charged for one journey. The minute that your journeys in one day add up to more than the daily-pass rate, you get charged the daily-pass rate, and no more. Similarly for your journeys in one week, with the weekly pass. And so on. Really, there’s only one plan, and there’s no way to get inadvertently ripped off.

When AT&T decided to abolish unlimited data usage on its smartphones, that’s the kind of of plan it should have implemented. Instead, it went the evil route, and it’s forcing its current customers to make one of three different choices, based on limited information. Whatever they choose is quite likely to be the wrong choice, and AT&T will chortle as it collects all that extra money which its customers didn’t need to pay.

The first choice is known as Data Plus, and gives 200 MB of data for $15. If you go over the 200 MB cap, you pay another $15 for another 200 MB. If you go over that cap, it’s not clear what happens, but you’ve already paid $30 and will certainly be asked to pay more.

The second choice, Data Pro, gives you 2 GB of data for $25, and then $10 per GB thereafter.

And the third choice is to stay grandfathered in to the current plan, which is $30 per month for unlimited data usage.

You can switch as much as you like between Plus and Pro, but once you leave the unlimited plan, you’ve left forever; you can’t go back.

AT&T is good at disingenuous statements like this:

Currently, 65 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 200 MB of data per month on average.

This is disingenuous on two levels. First, as John Gruber points out, it carefully talks about “smartphones” rather than iPhones: the number for iPhone users is surely significantly lower.

But second, just because you’re using less than 200 MB of data on average doesn’t mean that you should necessarily choose Data Plus. I’ve just had a look over my most recent iPhone bills, and here’s my monthly data usage over the past 8 months: 202, 120, 160, 143, 89, 39, 333, 287. On average, I’m using 172 MB of data per month, and even with the overage charges I would have been better off with Plus rather than Pro. But for the past couple of months I’ve been significantly over 200 MB, and would be better off with Pro rather than Plus. And then, if I get the new iPhone 4G, is that going to raise my data consumption? Who knows.

At least with the subway you’re in control of how much you use it. With data usage on a phone, it often comes down to questions consumers can’t be expected to understand: how much data does say Google Maps use? And, more generally, if the AT&T network is good, and doesn’t time out on a regular basis, you’re going to use it more. And consumers can’t reasonably predict how good the AT&T network is going to be next month.

AT&T could easily have saved consumers all the trouble of having to try to predict their next month’s data usage by having a single plan: $15 for the first 200 MB, say, and then $10 per GB thereafter. They didn’t, because they’re looking forward to getting $30 per month from people exceeding 200 MB of data but who use nowhere near the 2 GB that “Pro” users get for $25. That’s where AT&T is evil, even if you think (contra Jeff Jarvis) that it makes sense to abolish unlimited plans.